


and saw annihilation

by tortoiseshells



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, WandaVision (TV)
Genre: Canon-Compliant to the end of WandaVision 1x05 (and it's anyone's guess afterwards), Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, F/M, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Jewish Wanda Maximoff, Suicidal Ideation (brief mentions), Survivor Guilt, out of chronological order
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-11
Updated: 2021-02-11
Packaged: 2021-03-18 01:15:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29360124
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tortoiseshells/pseuds/tortoiseshells
Summary: Trauma may be cumulative, and Wanda's always looks the same: same destruction, same sounds, same pieces - and the color red.
Relationships: Pietro Maximoff & Wanda Maximoff, Wanda Maximoff & Vision, Wanda Maximoff/Vision
Comments: 8
Kudos: 47





	and saw annihilation

**i.**

There is a thing that only exists after an explosion, Wanda Maximoff thinks. A vacuum of noise; the silence made deafening by the roar that preceded it, its sudden absence. In the shell of her ear: the rush of blood, the pounding heart, the thoughts that spill in, shrieking to be heard.

Her first acquaintance with this thing was so long ago, but when she smells clove and sweet citrus, she can see the shattered mug, her mother’s beckoning hand, the silver-sharp _Stark Industries_ close enough to touch. Pietro tucked her head into his shoulder, shushing her gently; Wanda counted to ten once, then twice, then fifty times.

The brick shifted. The rubble rumbled. Her mouth went sour, then dry, then numb. Something was dripping. Mama’s hand crooked two fingers, bidding them to come, but the rest was gone. The rest was red.

**viii.**

This is not an explosion, but the thing that follows is the same. The ringing in her ears, how her heart stutters and sluices and every part of her seems either sick or scarlet. She has been returned from oblivion for two weeks, and there is a text from an unknown number. A grainy photo like a stilled video. Surveillance: the inside of a bright, cold room. Wanda knows rooms like that, had been reborn in one not so long ago. She had to squint, but then she saw it. A broken hand; an eye gone milky-white;

something silver-sharp; something in pieces. _Someone_.

_Two weeks or five years_ , she thinks desperately – more than enough time to bury or burn. That was what he’d wanted. She was there, in those first weeks, when becoming an Avenger had included as much paperwork as aches and bruises; they’d spoken frankly of death and burial and remembrance on long sleepless nights – even after shloshim, when there was too much pain to either live or die.

_I was ready_ , she’d said, looking over the edge of the roof like it was the answer to a thorny question.

_Do you resent me for making such a choice for you, Miss Maximoff?_

Under the stars, Vision had looked smaller, unsure – and she’d lied, returning his kindness in sitting with her in her grief: _No._ It had become true in time. By and by, it ceased to be a question of merely disinterested kindness at all.

In the texted image, there is a hand, two fingers gone, the others split as if to claw, to reach, to hold.

**ii.**

This is not an explosion, but the thing that follows is the same. Every part of her is cold, ever part of her feels acid-sick, every part of her sings of singed flesh and rotted citrus and red, red, red. Wanda Maximoff cannot see the tips of her fingers; cannot feel the breath in her lungs. 

She might be dead. This might be death.

No part of her is where it should be, after List and Strucker drowned her in the weird yellow-blue light; each shard of bone and scrap of flesh unspooled, sinews stretched beyond breaking. The scepter is taking her apart –

limb by limb – 

cell by cell – 

And then restringing her, like beads of a broken necklace. Wanda is still Wanda, but the yellow has knotted itself around her ribs, her hands, her _metacarpals and phalanges_ (she thinks, but the words are not hers, the voice is not hers). Sinking into her fingers, curling them towards her palm in curious ways – a movement like playing the piano, in their warm apartment in Novi Grad. A beckoning like her mother’s ruined hand. _Come home, Wanda_. It is carving space in her brain, it becomes her. The two of them change inexorably. Her head aches; she’s nearly blind with pain, the brilliant red that smells first like cloves and then of corpse. 

She is alone, and though she is awake she dreams that Pietro is here, that Pietro will turn her head into his shoulder and count with her to ten, twice and then again. As much as it will take to carry them from morning to night, and night to morning. Even when she closes her eyes, the light is too much.

She lashes out, agony snapping like a scarlet circus whip. 

An exploding bulb. Darkness. There is a sound that is much like absence.

**iii.**

Pietro bleeds red, and red shatters out of her.

This is not an explosion. The thing that follows is the same. Destruction. Annihilation. Metal bodies ripped limb from limb, a heart-like pump torn from a vibranium chest. She could do worse. She _wants_ to do worse. There is rubble everywhere; the dust chokes, and she wants Pietro’s shoulder to turn into, his hand that blocked what was oozing red or silver-sharp from sight. 

All she has now is a handful of moments in the broken remains of Novi Grad, and she is grateful to think that the ground is coming up beneath her. She stopped Ultron, she _killed_ what _killed_ her. She will rest in wreckage and dust, and perhaps the earth.

Then there _is_ an explosion, but by then, Vision has carried far away.

**iv.**

Not long after she lights the yahrzeit candle for Pietro, and sadly contemplates the many years that will pass as she grows older and he does not, there is another explosion, in a country that is not hers.

She wasn’t enough. She sees what she saw at ten, writ large. Dust. Rubble. Death. She has made herself and Pietro again. She wasn’t enough.

**vii.**

There is an explosion. There is a thing very much like a sound.

Her head is hollow and ringing like a bell, and after the shattering yellow wave, she feels as though she is in pieces, as though she’ll have to pull the scraps of herself together.

Eyes blurred, her rings looked like shrapnel, silver-sharp. Red hands. Every disjointed part of her is wrung out, oozing bile; desperately wishing that Thanos would take his rage at being foiled and crush her. Finish the job. Surely it would be so easy for him to snap her neck, or burn her out of existence?

She tries – she really _tries_ – to earn it for herself. To stop him for a moment, even as Thanos reverses time, blotting out her crime on the way to a far greater one. How terrible a thing, she thinks, that she must fight for Vision to remain lost. Her head hits the ground with a horrible thud.

But she fails. 

Again.

Mouthing the familiar blessing, Wanda drags herself across the ground towards the grey remains. Baruch atah Adonai …

There was no explosion. There was a thing very much like a sound – and then there was nothing at all.

**v.**

“You will outlive me,” Wanda says into the gloom, into his shoulder. She hadn’t quite meant it, but she’d run through her thin store of patience, and had moved into the maudlin stage of illness. Three days. She only had three days with Vision, and the persistent sniffle that had dogged her since the Rogue Avengers’ last foray into Siberia had turned into a full-blown flu; instead of exploring the city, she was sat up under a pile of blankets and ignoring their game of chess to watch the snow fall.

“Likely,” Vision replies, truth without judgment. She feels his hand against her forehead and against her cheek, checking her fever while he thinks. “Does this bother you?”

She sneezes into a tissue. So much for a serious answer; Vision obligingly rises from the bed and fetches the can, though, ill or not, she could still summon the thing to her side with a flick of her fingers. For a moment, she stares at her hands, let the red light glow softly around them. All that power. Destruction, chaos. Could it spin a longer life-line for her? Did she want it to?

“It does.” Wanda slots their hands back together. “For your sake, it does.”

Vision hums his acknowledgment, though his fingers tighten around hers. She’s given him a gift, she can see him thinking. That she cares to look ahead to his future, and see the hardship along the path. That she _wants_ to walk the path with him. A darker thought passes like a cloud, and he worries at it. It touches on the things which concern him most, after all.

“You once described grief as – as a kind of death, in its own right.”

She nods. She recalls their rooftop conversations, when she felt as though she would bleed out from Pietro’s loss. “You lose the person you were, with them. You must become someone else.”

“We are always becoming someone else.” 

“Grief doesn’t give you a choice.”

Vision agrees to this, bringing her hand up to kiss her knuckles, the back of her hand. She knows better than him, and he is sorry for it – she can see herself in his memories, how she’d been willing to drown in her own grief over Pietro, how she had lost her parents, how she had given up her future willingly in order to wreck vengeance on Tony Stark, to build a better world. How she had failed, and how she had allowed others to become like her. Vision’s thoughts hover as an uncertain cloud at the edge of this: sorrow, empathy. A feeling that for him smells laboratory-antiseptic, has the blinking lights of New York City blurrily, dizzyingly below; A feeling that sounds like a single wooden piece moved across a chessboard, the seat opposite empty, that looks like the blinking light of the Raft’s shock-collar, Rhodey motionless in the center of a crater, the door to her room that he cannot open without her permission.

Wanda names the components in his thoughts: _Alienation. Loneliness. Sorrow and shame. Fear for others. Fear for himself. Apprehension._

“Will grief feel like that?” 

“Something like,” she replies, made hesitant by the memory of pain, “It is … different, for every loss, I think. For everyone.”

He accepts that with a nod, and pushes a pawn forward, one square. 

**vii.**

Maybe it is that night, as the snow falls on Stockholm. Maybe it is later, while the heat of the day still rises out of Roman streets. 

“Wanda?” Vision’s voice is soft, careful, and waits for her to sleepily mutter, _Vizh?_ to continue.

“It brings you comfort, then, to think I will survive you?” 

She had been afraid of that question, but admits to the selfish impulse all the same. _Yes._ There will be someone to bathe her and dress her and put her in the earth, someone to pray for her soul, _yes_ – but above all, she will not have to work out some way to exist, to creep around the hole in her heart that Wanda knows he would leave.

Vision stops her apology before she can make it, though she can see the worry, the anticipation of sorrow in his thoughts, the spike of selfishness and longing he feels at the gate of an airport, or watching her stand alone on the platform as the train pulls away. “It's all right,” he says, “I understand.”

**ix.**

There is an explosion – one among many, her heart thumping like great guns, like fireworks, like _vengeance_ – impossibly easy to ignore. There is a thing very much like a sound.

Glass shatters. There is a body in pieces. She drifts down to the floor.

It’s all the same and it’s nothing alike. Wanda Maximoff is ten years old. Wanda Maximoff is twenty-nine years old. Wanda Maximoff is sixteen and twenty-six and all in between. 

There is a hand. Fingers. Sinews stretched, snapped. Torn. Reaching out to her from the rubble, beckoning. Eyes – _eye_ – gone milky white. In Novi Grad, even the bombs’ rolling thunder couldn’t dissuade the flies and beetles, while she and Pietro waited two days, Mama beckoning for them to come. Vibranium is incorruptible; slick-white maggots creep about just the same. Black vests, black guns. She doesn’t much care if she is bitten or stung; she knows what she will do if they try.

He’s all silver-sharp, skin vanished, pulled apart. Butchered. And yet – 

a humming, a sound like its absence, a sound like the color you see in the dark.

Schematics. Plans. Code. Arrayed around him, like knives, like meat cut from a carcass. All life will return to the earth in time; all things decay, and turn to dust. She _never_ asked to return from dust. She promised on a distant rooftop, long ago, that she’d never let him be returned from it.

Neither of them were able to hold on to what they wanted, in the life before this one, and so she strings the red between her hard-bitten hands, and crooks her fingers, as if to say, _Vizh, Come_.

_Come home._

**Author's Note:**

> No doubt Episode Six is going to throw even this tentative guess at how Wanda knew to pull off the heist from 1x05, but I can live in uncertainty for the next half-day, at least. Who sent the text? Your guess is as good as mine.


End file.
